Free The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken Page A

shelving.
    â€œPeggy. Shelve them, or not?”
    â€œNot yet,” I said. She sighed and pushed the cart off.
    James stood in silence on the other side of the desk. He looked ready to leave.
    â€œYou mean how to stop growing,” I said.
    â€œYes.” Now he looked at me. “Medicine, or operations, or something.”
    â€œI’m not sure we have anything here,” I said. That was a lie. I knew we didn’t. “A medical library somewhere, perhaps. Or a university library. But really—” I started pulling the bookmarks from the books. I tried to sound gentle. “Really, you should ask your doctor.”
    â€œI have,” he said. “I’ve asked a lot of doctors.”
    He didn’t care about Anna Swann, or the Irish Giant, or the Kentucky Giant. He’d said—I remembered—“Tall people. What they do.” I assumed he meant: what tall people do. What sort of work, what sort of lives. Instead he’d meant: what doctors do for tall people.
    He was a teenager who had grown into a solitary race. There was no Anna Swann for him, no Cape Cod Giantess. Only him, his shoulders carrying his head so far away from the heads of others that he had to sit down to have a private conversation with anyone, and often there wasn’t a chair large enough to accommodate him. Only a boy whose body was a miracle to others. You could believe in God, looking at James. He looked at himself, and decided not to.

The Assumption of Mrs. Sweatt
    I sometimes got into disagreements with patrons. They were rare. Despite my clumsiness with the outside world, I was the perfect public servant: deferential, dogged, oblivious to insults. Friendly but not overly familiar. It was one of the reasons I loved being a librarian: I got to conduct dozens of relationships simultaneously and successfully. I conformed myself always to the needs of the patrons (they certainly did not care about mine), told them they were right, called them Mr. and Mrs. and Miss when they did not bother to learn my smallest initial. Do you wonder why we’re called public
servants
?
    Every now and then, though, I would have a run-in with a patron who demanded something preposterous. Maybe they wanted me to immediately hand over a book so popular that others had been waiting months for it; maybe they wanted to supply a page-long shopping list of books so I could pull them off the shelves. Maybe they wanted not to be charged a penny for their enormous fines because they had been too busy to get to the library. (The most unmanageable patrons always told me how
busy
they were.) I’d say, politely, no. They’d say yes. I got firm; they got insulting. I’d start to explain my position in depth, they’d ask to see a manager—and then I’d bow my head (I
loved
this moment) and say, “I am Miss Cort, the director of the library.” It was not a title I ever otherwise claimed.
    I longed to say, Listen: in my library, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, the rude and busy are not rewarded. We honor manners, patience, good deeds, and grave misfortune only.
    And one of two things happened: the patrons returned, and either thought I’d forgotten what had happened or had forgotten themselves, and were amazed when I politely, smilingly remembered them by name.
    Or they never came back.
    James and I had not argued, but I’d felt I’d done something much worse in so misunderstanding what he’d wanted, in giving him
Medical Curiosities
. I could forgive myself social clumsiness, my occasional crippling shyness, a sharp tongue at the wrong time. I could not forgive sloppy library work, and that is what I was guilty of: a patron—my best, most beloved patron—needed help in finding something, and I’d jumped to a conclusion and given him books that were worse than useless. He’d asked me a straightforward question and I had not come close to providing an answer.
    But he returned